The present invention relates to a data input system applicable to a POS (Point Of Sales) terminal or a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).
Computers are in remarkably wide use in recent years, and in connection therewith an attempt to computerize information are being made in various kinds of business. Computerized information of various kinds are now indispensable to determining management strategy.
In the distributive industry, an ID number is attached to each article for sale, and the distribution of articles is recorded on the basis of the ID numbers. By so doing, high-efficiency management of stocks and order placement and acceptance is intended. In addition, accumulated data are analyzed to work out an effective sale strategy.
In general, ID numbers of articles and similar kind of data are entered from a keyboard. Since the amount of data that must be entered increases steadily, the data input operation is a burden.
Under these circumstances, various types of data input means, which may supersede keyboards, have been developed. Among such data input means is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system, which recognizes characters on a sheet of paper on the basis of the intensity pattern of light reflected from the sheet of paper. To enter characters, the operator is only required to trace the characters by means of a pen-type input device (input pen) having an image scanner at the distal end. Therefore, when an ID number attached to an article is input from a POS terminal or the like, the use of the OCR system is very efficient in comparison with a keyboard.
To recognize characters on a sheet of paper, the OCR system radiates light to them from a light source and detects the reflected light by a sensor. The intensity pattern of the reflected light is acquired, and an intensity pattern closest to the acquired pattern is selected from among the patterns stored in a dictionary beforehand. If the sheet of paper is stained, however, the OCR system may make an error in recognizing characters or may not be able recognize them at all. In such cases, corrections have to be entered from another type of input device, namely, a keyboard.
However, if the data entered from an input pen must be corrected by means of a keyboard, the user is required to switch the input device each time a correction is entered. Since this results in a deterioration in the operating efficiency, the correcting method described above is not suitable when the amount of data to be entered is very large.